Aaron Robinson: Out of Africa: Where Electric-Vehicle Batteries Come From, Part II

Does anyone care if their vehicle or laptop purchase helps pay for murder and environmental ruin in Africa?

Cobalt resides at No. 27 on the periodic table of elements, in the middle of a working-class enclave of industrial metals. It has common iron on one side and nickel on the other, but the lustrous silver mineral is itself an exotic high flier. Indeed, you’ll most often find cobalt cruising at about 35,000 feet as an alloy in the wheeling turbine blades of jet engines, used because of its strength and thermal stability.It’s those same properties that also make cobalt a key ingredient in the latest generation of powerful, long-lasting batteries for cell phones, laptop computers, and electric and hybrid cars. Many lithium-ion batteries, including the ones used in Tesla’s electric Roadster, employ cobalt as the primary material in the electricity-conducting cathode. And every 89-pound nickel-metal hydride battery pack in a new Prius contains, according to Toyota, four pounds of cobalt.

Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid concept

Last month’s column discussed how the world’s growing interest in electric vehicles is poised to turn some lithium-rich regions of South America into facsimiles of Saudi Arabia. Cobalt’s story is even more interesting, if a bit more unsettling.Cobalt extraction typically goes hand in hand with copper and nickel mining. About 80 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is believed to be in central Africa’s “copper belt,” a band of ancient, mineral-endowed soil straddling Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The Congo—two countries today bear the word Congo in their names—began a tumultuous independence from Belgium in 1960, culminating in a meltdown of relations among its various ethnicities following the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Since then, more than five million people are estimated to have been killed fighting in the DRC (the larger of the two countries), with the world’s demand for electronic devices helping fuel the slaughter.

The DRC has a lot of what both an EV and an iPhone need to hum, including copper, nickel, cobalt, gold, and the “three T’s”—tantalum, tin, and tungsten—all essential to making circuit boards and other electronic hardware. The mining of these minerals takes place amid “one of the worst conflict situations in the world,” says Congo policy analyst Aaron Hall of the Enough Project, which focuses on “conflict minerals” for the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning policy think tank started by the billionaire investor George Soros.

In the DRC’s eastern provinces of North and South Kivu, various rebel factions and the national army conduct mining at gunpoint or extract levies at checkpoints along the roads that fund their fighting. This summer, human-rights groups working to expose the link between consumer electronics and the DRC’s civil war scored a coup when President Obama signed the 2300-page Frank-Dodd financial-reform bill. An obscure provision requires publicly traded companies to report any usage of gold and/or the three T’s mined in the DRC. As yet, there are no penalties; Hall and his colleagues hope the reporting requirement alone shames the electronics industry into avoiding conflict minerals.

What about cobalt? The DRC’s southern province of Katanga, which produces most of the region’s cobalt, is more politically stable but is not without its troubles. The open-pit mining that produces cobalt is causing serious environmental degradation in Katanga. And locals have long complained that multinational mining conglomerates are draining the country of its natural treasures without contributing enough to its economy or development. In August, bandit diggers in Katanga rioted over access to a foreign-owned cobalt concession, claiming the mining firm doesn’t hire enough locals, forcing them to mine illegally. Last year, the DRC’s wobbly central government announced that it is reviewing all of its mining concessions, ostensibly to produce more favorable terms for the desperately poor nation. Meanwhile, William Buckovic, a Colorado-based geologist and cobalt prospector who is developing a cobalt claim in nearby Cameroon, says the black cobalt ore continues to be smuggled out of the DRC in gunnysacks. It heads for South Africa, then typically on to Asia, where almost all electronics are produced.

2011 Nissan Leaf

The auto industry is looking to reduce its cobalt dependency, experimenting with substitutes such as manganese and nickel, usually at a cost to weight and battery performance. Nissan says the batteries in its new Leaf electric car contain no cobalt, and California Institute of Technology battery expert Dr. Rachid Yazami believes that cobalt may be gone completely from electric-vehicle batteries within a decade. Before that happens, a wave of new EVs will arrive, touted as clean transportation for socially responsible types. You know these people; they’re the ones in Whole Foods carefully reading the package labels. Unlike food, cars don’t come with a detailed ingredient list. Does anyone living in our modern consumer paradise care if their vehicle purchase helps pay for murder and environmental ruin in Africa? I’m betting that the buyers of electric cars will.

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*AccuPayment estimates payments under various scenarios for budgeting and informational purposes only. AccuPayment does not state credit or lease terms that are available from a creditor or lessor, and AccuPayment is not an offer or promotion of a credit or lease transaction.